How to Publish That Book and Not Lose Your Soul- Day-32/10/2010 12:19:35 PMDay three talks about the Google deal and the department of Justice ruling and what it means for authors. See the other entries at my website wwww.lonniehicks.comFebruary 10, 2010

The news today is that the US Department of Justice put the brakes on the Google deal whereby Google had lower court permission to scan every book in the world for free. (An exaggeration, but that is my way.) Google has gotten rich by essentially scanning all the newspapers and magazines in the world and then not paying a dime for the priviledge. (Doesn't sound fair does it?) They had proposed to do the same with books. Naturally authors, and big publshing houses found this proposal troubling, (free again!!?) and went to court. Meantime, Google went right ahead with its mad scanning anyway and basically said "lets see if you people can stop me." Google won the court case, essentially, until the DOJ stepped in.

But that is not the real news. The two will work something out--why? Because the DOJ needs Google to keep an eye on terrorists and you and me. So a deal will be struck, trust me. DOJ will posture and then give Google what they want--which is Google Editions. Here is the real news. Just like Amazon, Apple and the big six publishers Google now wants to be a book publisher, (should I say scanning company?) In case you haven't noticed this means they are fighting over who gets to pick our literary bones. I feel weak don't you? So Google will publish your book and pay you in really good gruel, determine how many people get your book on searches, get you to pay it for any ads for the book and scan it and offer it at any price they choose so as to get people to come and use Google.

Its mean world Virginia. So here comes Johnny "way too naive" walking up to the giants mentioned above and says will you publish my book? Sure they say "but you have to pay us, and not complain if we take the property and do whatever we want with it. If you don't go along with this arrangement then no one will ever hear of your book, unless you spent millions as we do to publicize the book and then we will have our house critics pan it such that we will make an example of you?

Is this too cynical? No, not cynical enough. It is probably worse.

So now as we pass out the Zolof, what do we do now?

Well, the first suggestion is to take the best bargain out there right now--Amazon's createspace publishing arm, the last real bargain in author based publishing. First you can finish your book and get it up on Amazon in two days, pay only about 5 bucks to get copies and don't have to pay Amazon a dime for all this. Power to the people's authors. This is the best deal ever. Go now because the other publishers will likely try to shut this down.

As mentioned, writing a book is about 20% of what it takes to sell a book. The rest in publicity and marketing and that is what costs real money. Aside from family members you might talk into buying your book, what do you do after those less than seven copies are sold? How do you market and compete with books the big six are putting millions into for publicity and marketing? This is a problem I can solve as long as I do not have to solve it today. Let's see what comes up tomorrow. See you then.